He bobbed, babbling thanks, and somehow lost his hat again. Before he could regain it, Domitia took Glenda’s arm, and gently steered her away. “He didn’t mean any harm,” she said. “They just get excited, seeing someone new.”
“We could be making progress right now. Your carriage doesn’t need sleep. We could be on the road, closing in on those bastards.”
The witch clucked her tongue and guided them toward a stall hawking braids of bread. It stank of garlic and butter. “Glenda, Glenda. Why fight for a life you can’t enjoy?”
The humans queuing for the stall looked over their shoulders, blanched, and made way for the elves.
Glenda sniffed. “Another pearl of wisdom.”
“I am twice your age, you know, and wisdom does flowdownward.” The witch gave her a smile that flashed the edges of her jagged teeth. “I could easily be your mother.”
A full-body shiver ran through the elf, like a static shock.Now, why had that done something to her?
Then and there, Glenda vowed never to drink again. “Tomorrow,” she said, staring into the crowd with violet-flushed cheeks. “Tomorrow, we leave at dawn. I want to end this.”
CHAPTER 44
In Which I Cannot Understand Why, When We Are Safe and Hidden and Happy, He Insists on Creating His Own Horrors, or Why Something as Abstract as the Prospect of a Slightly Better World Might Matter to a Person More than His Own Limbs. And In Which I Am Just Now Realizing that I Had the Opportunity to Dull This Experience with Alcohol, but In Which It Is Too Late Now. In Which Things Have Already Begun.
Think of this as revenge,” Hydna had said, “for every time he’s been a cunt.”
It didn’t cheer me up.
“If I could handle your constant consumption of rodents, you can tolerate this,” Merulo had snarled.
That hadn’t helped either.
“Well, Mer,” Hydna said to her brother as I mounted the stairs to my viewing perch. “If I have to be ripping your limbs off, I’d rather it be in the heat of battle, but this’ll have to do.”
I sat in the outer ring of the arena. Hydna’s desk had been shoved to one side, clearing space for the grisly performance to come. A metal table held center-stage now, lit by a snakingartificial light that stood as tall as a man. On the table lay Merulo, his sister standing over him, gloved and masked, her hair tucked into a bulging cap. The blue shift fit her poorly, tearing along the armpits as she moved, but she’d insisted on the costume. Cloaked in plastic, with her glittering tray of enchanted knives, Hydna looked like something from a nightmare.
“This is the best part!” she hollered up at me, waving a knife. “I’ve always wanted to knock this fucker out.”
I sank lower in my seat, hoping the distance would hide my expression. Would it distract her from the surgery if I began to vomit? The temptation mounted to leave now and poke about a mummy pool while Hydna did . . . what she would do, but I couldn’t surrender to my cowardice. Not this time.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, get this over with.” Merulo’s voice sounded tinny from so far below. “Or would you have me laid out like a mackerel for the next hour while you chitchat with that f—” His insult cut off as Hydna chanted the command word, activating the bloody sigil painted on his chest. Dragons, it seemed, were significantly more expensive to spell into unconsciousness than handsome knights.
Motionless now, Merulo looked for all the world dead on the table. A cloth modestly covered his genitals, but the rest of his exposed skin shone fish-belly white under the electric lighting. I felt uncomfortable seeing the scar tissue that enveloped his lower torso; he kept it so deliberately hidden while in human form. His left arm and right leg were marked with black-inked crosses. “So I don’t get mixed up and take everything off!” Hydna had explained jovially.
I forced myself to watch as she began. She hoisted a cleaver,heavy with sigils, and chopped down with more enthusiasm than I thought warranted. Merulo’s arm separated in an easy, unreal motion, like she’d popped the limb off a doll. She spat a quick word, encasing the severed arm in magically summoned ice, then swapped her weapon for smaller instruments, clipping carefully at the spurting wound. Blood speckled her face and clothing. I wondered at Merulo’s ability to survive this.
When she moved to his leg, I hid my face. Enough bravery for one day.
After some time, I looked up to see that it was done. Having stitched and tidied the stumps, Hydna occupied herself with returning tools to their original line-up. With her dark chore completed and cleanup underway, I expected some of the tension to lift—instead, she hesitated. Emotion was difficult to read from this distance, but something had shifted in her posture.
I jumped to my feet, ready to race down the stairs and join her at Merulo’s side, but as easily as it came, the moment passed. Confidence filled her broad frame again and, setting down the blade, Hydna moved to where her brother lay prone. I watched in great nervousness, as she bit into the meat of her index finger, smearing the resulting blood across the sorcerer’s thin chest to paint another sigil. Slamming a hand over his ribs, Hydna belted out a string of words.
I saw motion on Merulo’s stumps. His flesh rippled like water, melting into shiny new skin that sealed itself over the puckered red stitchwork. But they’d said . . .
“You’ll drain yourself!” I shouted.
The distant woman shook her head. “I’ll still have enough for what we need to do.”
Speed made me clumsy as I tripped my way down the seemingly infinite stairs, finally slamming past the barrier gate to join the siblings in the arena’s center. Just in time: Hydna completed a second spell and the sorcerer sat up with a gasp, looking disturbingly reduced with his missing limbs. His single eye scoured the arena, wild and confused, until it fell on me.
“I thought it would hurt,” he said airily. “It hurt when I took my eye out.”
He collapsed back against the table.
